SANTA CRUZ >> Fifteen years ago, a team of UCSC researchers published the first complete draft of the human genome. Today, their data is helping scientists and doctors develop targeted treatments for cancer and other illnesses — and much of that innovation is happening in Santa Cruz.

At a standing-room-only event Monday night, five speakers chronicled Santa Cruz’s past, present and future as a genomics research hub, highlighting some of the developments coming out of UCSC labs and Santa Cruz-based genomics companies.

David Haussler, the scientific director of UCSC’s genomics institute, spoke about his lab’s involvement in the Human Genome Project, an ambitious international effort begun in the 1980s to sequence the entire human genetic code and map every gene within it. The resulting data set would publicly accessible for free.

Haussler’s team at UCSC published their genome online on July 7, 2000, the first such data set available to the public. “A new era in our own biology was available to us,” Haussler said of that day. “Everyone in the world got to see our heritage for the first time”

Its impact is still felt today: the UCSC Genome Browser now gets 1.2 million web hits daily, Haussler said.

Plus, UCSC’s genomics research has spawned related start-up companies in Santa Cruz. Representatives from two of these companies spoke at Monday’s event.

NantOmics using genomic data to treat cancer, said Executive Vice President Charles Vaske, a UCSC alum. By comparing the DNA in a cancer patient’s tumor to the DNA in their blood, it’s sometimes possible to determine the mutation that led to the cancer and then use this information to develop a more specific treatment.

Dovetail Genomics is working on large-scale genome assembly. It can assemble the genome of a never-before-sequenced organism from a DNA sample in just less than two months. In comparison, the Human Genome Project took 18 years to complete.

Last week, “someone came in off the street who wanted the elephant seal genome done,” said Ed Green, a UCSC biomolecular engineer and a scientific adviser for Dovetail.

Genomics startups without UCSC ties are also choosing Santa Cruz as their home.

For instance, Somagenics CEO Brian Johnston spoke about a treatment that the company is developing to speed wound healing in diabetics, who are susceptible to slow-healing foot sores that in rare cases can lead to amputations. They use specially treated RNA molecules to target molecules that encourage wound healing and turn them back on.

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For Ravi Jain, the managing director of UCSC’s genomics institute and the fifth speaker at Monday’s panel, the future of genomics is rooted in shared data, which gives researchers access to bigger databases of knowledge. For example, the UCSC’s Treehouse Childhood Cancer Project uses shared genomic data to analyze and better treat cancer in children.

“It’s our hope to bring this to the community for social good, while also developing Santa Cruz as a hub for genomics,” he said.